[5] In a letter to her mother, Queen Sophia Dorothea of Prussia, the Queen wrote:[6] He brought me to one side of the garden and I was surprised to suddenly be part of a fairy tale, for the King had built a Chinese castle, the most beautiful one can see.Having been built in haste and secrecy, the small castle did not endure the harsh Swedish climate.

After ten years, rot had begun to attack the wooden frame and the King and Queen commissioned Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz to create a new and bigger pavilion made from more durable materials.

The architecture is essentially rococo and was intended to have an exotic character, containing Chinese elements, which were considered the height of fashion at the time.

[8] The rooms of the pavilion are full of luxury items brought to Sweden from China by the Swedish East India Company: porcelain, silk, lacquers, etc.

[8] The walls in the Yellow Room are covered with Chinese lacquered panels, at the time a fascinating technique since no parallel craft existed in Europe.

The motifs are scenes from Canton (now known as Guangzhou) by the Pearl River and the European Thirteen Factories separated from the city by double walls.

All the elements necessary for a royal English style pleasure garden were already present in 1781, when Fredrik Magnus Piper drew up the plans for the park.

These included streams, bridges, knolls, sloping lawns (French: pelouse) and several small pavilions and gazebos in different styles.

[13] In Piper's 1797 land use plan, one extension to the north was to contain a cave with canals and cascades, a small lake with bridges and walking paths, and a Turkish pavilion.

The street and its houses were established by Queen Lovisa Ulrika and King Adolf Frederick as a small factory community called Kanton.

Mulberry trees were planted for silkworm breeding, but the climate was too cold and the project only lasted about ten years.

It has been used for various things over the years, at one time being the home of Anna Sophia Hagman, official royal mistress to Prince Frederick Adolf of Sweden.

The UNESCO comments were:[22] The Royal Domain of Drottningholm stands on an island in Lake Mälar in a suburb of Stockholm.